Page 47 of Redline Baby

"Hold still."

I hold still.

He wets a pad with saline and cleans around the road rash without scrubbing at it, methodical, careful. I keep my eyes on the photograph. The wound looks worse in the clean fluorescent light than it did on the side of the road. Raw. Angry.

Soren doesn't comment on that either. He examines the skin around it, checks that the bleeding has stopped, then looks at my hand.

"Move your fingers."

I do.

"Any numbness?"

"No."

"Tingling?"

"No."

He lightly presses along the bones of my wrist and forearm, stopping well before he reaches the shoulder. My jaw locks anyway. He notices. Of course he notices. His hands stop.

"No."

I look at him. "No what?"

"I'm done."

"You barely checked anything."

"I checked enough, Kit," he says.

"You haven't even looked at the shoulder."

"Exactly." He folds a fresh sterile dressing over the road rash and secures it. "I'm not manipulating a shoulder you can barely move after a high-speed crash."

"I can move it."

"Thirty degrees doesn't count." Then he stands. "We're going to the ER."

"Soren."

"No. Enough." He says, definitive.

"You don't get to just—"

"I know," he says. The answer is immediate and calm. It cuts straight across the argument I was building. He steps back enough that I have space, but his attention never leaves me. "I know what I get to decide for you and what I don't."

My mouth closes. He continues.

"I am not your Daddy. We don't have a dynamic. You didn't give me authority over you."

Something strange happens in my chest hearing him say it that plainly.

"But," he says, "I am allowed to tell you when you're making a terrible decision. You crashed at over a hundred miles an hour last night. You can't raise your left arm. Your shoulder is grinding when you move it. You have road rash deep enough that Dex had to keep pressure on it, and you spent the night refusing medical care because you don't have money. You need imaging. You may need stitches. And I'm not going to stand here pretending urgent care and an ice pack are adequate because you're scared of a bill."

"I'm not scared."

"Fine. Angry at a bill."